2004 June

Several months ago, Apple released the music software Garageband, allowing anyone with a mac to make some music. Soon after the release, community websites sprang up to allow Garageband users to share music with each other, and build songs together. This is a perfect use for Creative Commons licenses, and earlier we noted that the site Macband added our licenses to their site. We were delighted to hear that MacJams has also incorporated Creative Commons licenses into their song uploading process.

So if you’re a Garageband user that needs some drum loops or other song parts to share, check out Macband and MacJams.

The writings of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg may be amongst the most important in the 20th Century but it’s the sound of Burroughs’ growl and the haunting lilt in Ginsberg’s recitals that have compelled turntablists to use samples of their speaking voices. Sampling pioneers and Ninjatune entrepreneurs Jonathan More and Matt Black (a.k.a. Coldcut) have used Burroughs and Ginsberg for a while and continue to do so.

Thanks to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from Naropa University, you can hear hundreds of hours of lectures and readings by Burroughs, Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka and others all of which have been posted to the Archive as part of the Naropa Collection. As of this writing there are 147 (!) uploads to the stunning collection.

Burroughs is of special interest due to his exploration of assembling fragments of writings and audio tape (what he called “cut-ups”) in the 1960’s and 70’s that lead directly to follow-up projects by Brian Eno, David Bowie, Plunderphonics and hence the mainstreaming of tape sampling as a music genre. His 1976 lecture at the Kerouac School should be required listening as a background on cut-ups.

Of course the lectures are of invaluable literary value. Burroughs and others delve deep into their personal relationships with various works of literature ranging from Conrad to Fitzgerald, Wordsworth to Whitman.

We’ve recently flipped the switch on German Creative Commons licenses. Like the recent Brazil, Finland, and Japan licenses, in addition to the rewritten legal code that is now based on German law, the license interface is now available in German, as well as the licenses themselves.

Following many requests on cc-licenses for a list with a more general charter, we’ve createdcc-community. If you have a burning question or discussion point related to Creative Commons that doesn’t seem to fit the specific description of any of our many discussion lists, hold back no longer.

One of the kings of scientific publishing, the journal Nature, has recently launched a forum to bring together articles and information about open access publishing. They’ve even got an RSS feed for updates to the forum.

It’s great to see a top journal open a dialogue about a somewhat controversial issue in the scientific publishing industry. In an age of ever increasing journal subscription costs and shrinking library budgets, many smaller journals have embraced the concept of open access publishing and a prominent journal started with the issue at heart, but many larger publishers have distanced themselves from the topic. [via furdlog]

Cabinet minister by day, mover of souls by night. At total ease bouncing from baritone to falsetto and back again. As nimble on stage as those half his age. Master of a crowd and, in person, friendly as can be. Gold-selling and Creative Commons-adopting. Is Gilberto Gil the world’s coolest man?